Tiffany Girls

By Line:

By Nancy Robinson

About The Author:

Nancy Robinson is a Senior Contributing Editor to Furniture Style magazine and its supplement, Home Fashion Forecast. She also writes for several other Vance publications within the Interiors Group, including Residential Lighting, Hospitality Lighting and Accessory Merchandising.
Nancy has been covering the home furnishings business since 1987 and believes it's an ideal fit in terms of her skills and interests in home and fashion. She has covered several other industries during her journalism career, but has found home furnishings to be far and away the most interesting, fun and rewarding. She is thrilled to be associated with the industry's leading fashion and trend reporting trade magazine, which has grown steadily in both stature and influence during the 10 years since it was launched.
Nancy's areas of responsibility for Furniture Style include Upholstery Fabrics, Stationary Upholstery and Merchandising Trends. She regularly covers the Showtime fabric market as well as the High Point Fu

April 14, 2009

Gray

Gray: Several important clues led to the discovery that women had a direct role in the creation of lamps, windows and other luxury objects long thought to be designed exclusively by Louis Comfort Tiffany, [Tiffany Studios] founder and artistic director.

One of those clues was an article published in 1894 titled “Women Workers in Glass at the Tiffany Studios.” We now know that a women’s glass-cutting department at Tiffany’s originated in 1892 when the Men’s Lead Glaziers and Glass Cutters went on strike citywide, and the stained glass business came to a screeching halt. At the time, Tiffany was preparing for his big, splashy exhibition at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was organizing a huge display with a chapel and was trying to get this work done when they went on strike, so he hired women from art schools. He started out with a department of six women and discovered that they could actually do really, really good work. In less than two years, the department grew to 35 women.

Another clue was in an article published in 1904 in the New York Daily News titled “Women Who Make $10,000 a Year or More.” It included a picture of Clara Driscoll and the Dragonfly lamp, captioned “Mrs. Driscoll’s prize-winning lamp.” This was the first and only time that an actual design for a leaded-glass lamp was credited to a particular designer.

Clara Driscoll was a designer at Tiffany Studios between 1888 and 1909 and responsible for many of the firm’s most iconic lamps, including the Wisteria, Dragonfly and Poppy. She

was also the manager of a large department of young women, known as the Tiffany Girls, who specialized in selecting and cutting glass for windows, lamp shades and mosaics. Driscoll was born in Ohio in 1861, and she attended the Western Reserve School of Art. She moved to New York in 1888 to attend the Metropolitan Museum School of Art before joining Tiffany.